If you concentrate too intensely on the mobile phone, while walking on the street or the sidewalk, you can quickly hit an object and cause an accident. The Canadian scientist Juan David Hincapie-Ramos has now developed a new combination of hardware and software that provides an early warning system for cell phone Distracted.
The scientist, student at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, has developed, together with colleagues, a system called Crash Alert, which uses a camera to detect obstacles at an early stage and display a warning message on the smartphone screen, before it’s too late. So it should be possible to focus on the latest e-mails and Twitter messages even while walking without presenting a traffic hazard.
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Hincapie-Ramos admits that it would be better to get people to, just once, put away their device, while walking. But that is just unrealistic now. “People will not just stop texting while walking. We have to adapt mobile phone in our everyday habits, so they must themselves help us to give back what we lose by it.”
The researcher hopes that this solution can be installed in the first devices soon. The prototype, that Hincapie-Ramos has realized with the junior professor Pourang Irani, currently consists of a seven-inch Acer tablet, in which a cost-effective Microsoft Kinect motion sensor is connected. Still now, the system is impractical: A laptop with a big battery, on which the Kinect hardware is connected must be carried in a backpack.